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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading a story about a year ago, reporting that stores would ask people using their smartphones to leave - they were worried that they were checking for lower prices in the area. This seems like it might be met with the same sort of attitude, at first.

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When I'm in a store, I like to scan product's barcodes to see what the reviews are on Amazon. If it's a few dollars difference in price, then I'll still purchase the item, depending on if the rating is good enough. If the price is more than several dollars, though, I'll have to decide whether to pay extra for instant gratification, or if it's worth waiting a few days to get to me.

If a store attempts to stop me from scanning barcodes in this manner, I just mark it as a store that is not competitive price-wise and will no longer go there.

What you are saying is completely valid if you are comparing the prices between two physical stores in the same general area. The problem (which may or may not be an actual problem) is that the overhead of operating a store that allows browsing demands the price to not be competitive against amazon (if you are defining not competitive as 10% more expensive).

This will only become an increasing problem as more people do what is discussed in the article. Best Buy will have to handle all of the foot traffic for both their own sales and for Amazon sales, that will lower their conversion rates which means they have to have an even higher markup which will drive more people to buy online and so on. At some point the store will go out of business and you won't even be able to pay the $10 extra to be able to physically compare products even if you wanted to.

> If a store attempts to stop me from scanning barcodes in this manner, I just mark it as a store that is not competitive price-wise and will no longer go there.

Precisely. If they're doing that, it's because they know you can do better elsewhere.

But you see how this is a one-way relationship between them and Amazon, right? Even if they match the price of Amazon, they are on the losing end-of-the-stick because:

1) They have to pay the expenses for physically hosting that product 2) They may also have to collect state tax

So what they get out this relationship is that the customer uses store resources to investigate a product, and then either a) goes home and orders the product or b) buys the product at the store out of instant gratification.

Amazon either wins big in case a), or in b) incurs the slight cost of hosting the online resources that allowed you to do that research. The store obviously loses big in case a) and it still might lose in case b, if the product was priced so low as to be a loss-leader but you ended up not buying anything else.

Not saying what you're doing is wrong or bad. Just pointing out that the store is kind of against the brick wall, so to speak.

Perhaps the future for retailers is to adopt a gas station model: depend on Amazon to do the supplying, and make money off of something totally unrelated, just as gas stations make more profit off of a cup of coffee than they do for a full tank of gas.

I've been in a few stores where they were clearly placing stickers on top of the bar codes to make it more difficult to price check... fortunately, most big ticket household items like TVs have unique product numbers that are relatively easy to search for, but I could see this discouraging a few shoppers.

For things like TVs, Best Buy et al tend to be price competitive. It's add-on things like the HDMI cables and extended warranties where they screw customers with hugely inflated margins.

I ended up buying a TV on black friday at Best Buy that was cheaper than on Amazon, even after state sales tax, which was surprising.

You can also take a picture of most things- it's a little less accurate, but it still works.

Also, when a store puts their own barcode over one, I generally don't feel any guilt about peeling it back a little and scanning the original.

I love buying things off of Amazon, but almost always -- out of a dumb sort of courtesy -- I will buy a product that I became interested in from seeing it at the store. Brick and mortar has its own inherent expenses, and I can see why such stores would get annoyed when shoppers take the best from both worlds: being able to touch and test a product in the flesh and the cheaper prices of an online retailer.

In what ways can a brick-and-mortar store improve their business model to compete with this? Providing excellent customer service and expertise won't do anything to address the problem (as I can always suck up a salesperson's time and then go home and buy the product).

On the other hand, Apple stores have this exact same problem...even more so because a) their markup is even higher than electronic retail and b) the literally allow you to see how much more expensive their prices are compared to online listings, right from their own demo computers.

I don't buy much from the Apple stores but when I do, I feel even more compelled to continue my dumb-courtesy and pay the extra $10-$20 in-store. But I don't how extendable the Apple magic is to every kind of retailer

Apple still get the money if you buy their products elsewhere.

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